


Love did us in

by Mere_Mortifer



Category: La Divina Commedia | The Divine Comedy - Dante Alighieri, The Chain - Fleetwood Mac (Song)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, F/M, Inferno (La Divina Commedia | The Divine Comedy - Dante Alighieri), Inspired by Music, Introspection, M/M, Missing Scene, No Dialogue, POV Alternating, POV First Person, POV Second Person, Romance, Songfic, Stream of Consciousness, Yuletide 2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:35:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28133286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mere_Mortifer/pseuds/Mere_Mortifer
Summary: Francesca, there are so very few of us who’ve been granted the mercy of not being alone.A silent conversation between Francesca and Virgil before she tells her story to Dante.
Relationships: Durante degli Alighieri | Dante Alighieri/Publius Vergilius Maro | Virgil, Paolo Malatesta/Francesca da Rimini
Comments: 11
Kudos: 21
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Love did us in

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jedi_penguin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jedi_penguin/gifts).



> In your sign up you said you'd love a story where the lyrics to The Chain are taken literally, and that you were open to a crossover with another fandom. Well, that made me immediately think of Dante's Inferno, specifically of the Paolo and Francesca!
> 
> If you or anyone who clicked on this is not super familair with Dante's work, here's some things you need to know for this fic to make sense:  
> 1\. All souls in Hell are damned to an eternity spent alone, apart from three couples: Ulysses and brothers-in-arms (or were they more than brothers-in-arms...?) Diomedes; Count Ugolino and the Archbishop Ruggeri who caused his death; and Paolo and Francesca, who were killed by her husband after he caught them together.  
> 2\. In-universe Virgil is chosen by God as Dante's guide. Subtextually he is supposed to represent the light of human reason, strong enough to show Dante what he needs to see but not enough to reach God; metatextually...Virgil was one of Dante's favourite authors, and he himself confesses (in the text! Insane behaviour!) that he is one of the main reasons why Dante got into writing himself. Basically all the memes about how The Divine Comedy is a self-insert fanfiction where Dante can put the people he dislikes through torture and meet his idols aren't too far off.  
> 3\. Virgil, as a pagan (a.k.a. unbaptized), can't access Heaven. He is granted permission to accompany Dante through both Hell and Purgatory, but he gets sent back as soon as they reach the gates of Heaven, where Beatrice (the woman Dante loved in real life, and who died young) will take over for him. Virgil dissappears before Dante even knows what's happened, and he is left so heartbroken that Beatrice has to scold him for acting in such a way _literally_ in front of God and everyone.  
> 4\. Souls have knowledge of both past, present (as in, what's happening in the land of the living), and future, a literary device that Dante uses to include prophecies and references to people who are still alive many times throughout the story. I stretched this concept a bit to include that Virgil would know what's going through Francesca's mind when they meet, and vice versa.
> 
> That's all, sorry for the long notes! I had a lot of fun with this, and I hope you enjoy it :)

_Listen to the wind blow_  
_Down comes the night_  
_Run in the shadows_  
_Damn your love, damn your lies_

You were fifteen when you got married. 

You fell in love a year later. 

Not to the same man, to no one’s surprise—destiny hadn’t been that kind to you; your family even less. 

Marriages of convenience weren’t anything out of the ordinary, really, and you’d known your fate long before you were thrown in the reluctant arms of Giovanni. The politics behind it had been both boring and too important to defy, and for that first year you had just counted yourself lucky that Giovanni—busy, crude, old Giovanni—wasn’t around much. 

But hadn’t that been your ruin, Francesca? When Giovanni wasn’t there, who was? With his curly hair, and the broad shoulders, and the trembling lips kissing the corner of your mouth like he would die if he didn’t, he’d _die_. And you, Francesca, so stupid, so young—I don’t blame you for tilting your head and licking his bottom lip until he opened up for you, and kissed him for real. 

(Paolo was older, but you’d burned brighter.) 

Maybe that’s why you ended up here. Tamper that fire, girl, who do you think you are? 

You turn to look at him, now, the translucent side of his profile barely visible in the hail raining down on you—relentless, relentless, relentless. To not have flesh, and still hurt this badly; no blood to get cold, and still feel it turn to ice in the veins you left to rot much, much higher up than you are now. 

I believe you’ve never quite understood your luck.

How much sweeter is the torment for you, soul-tied to the one you’ve loved enough he'd knocked your Devotion out of its axis? The loneliness is a ferocious bite down here. I watch you watch him as the others around us wail in agony from the wind, from the cold, from the guilt of long-gone mistakes; as the poet in my charge, heart still beating in his chest, lets his eyes roam in search of meaning. Francesca, there are so very few who’ve been granted the mercy of not being alone. You’re aware of who the others are. You’re aware that the poet now standing next to me will write you into history, and your name will be uttered for centuries next to Ulysses’, next to Brutus’, next to mine.

Paolo’s, too, and again the thread of Fate that has sewn you together will long outlive the spilled blood that brought you here. One thing I’m not privy to—did they bury you together? Did they think that would make a difference? 

Ungrateful child. We’re all cursed with knowing too much when we’re dragged down through the soil—I've felt, as it were my own, your resentment and your desire to gnaw at your own being until you’re freed from him. They’re always so brief, those moments of desperate claustrophobia; they pale and wither away when the love resurfaces. 

Still, it’s enough to despise you. 

_And if you don't love me now_  
_You will never love me again_  
_I can still hear you saying_  
_You would never break the chain_

He looks so strangely real next to you. 

Your poet, wrapped in red. He trails his eyes over you as you point your finger here and there, mouth moving (whose story are you weaving?), and he glances back only when he thinks he won't be caught. I can feel the tendrils of his adoration keeping you tethered to the ground you were never supposed to touch, and I wonder if that will be enough to send him straight down here to keep us company when his time comes. 

You realise that’s all that’s keeping you here, really. Adoration. A few degrees away from the approved kind. That’s why you were picked in the first place: because he likes you, because he wants to be you, 

( _with_ you?)

(oh, he will suffer our fate, after all)

and when he wraps his arm around yours and puts his shivering hand there where your fingers can brush...then, right then you remember what the turmoil of blood serpentine, fast rushing to one’s face feels like; and you look at me, and I stop marveling at the curve of Paolo’s lips long enough to look back, and if the wind wasn’t roaring so loudly I would tell you _see? how fast the anger fades?_

You know in that moment that this will be the worst journey you’ll ever take, and that you’ll miss it terribly, which you guess it’s a torture in and of itself, which you guess it’s all par for the course—your fault for thinking God’s favour would be nothing but stone-heavy. 

You don’t even have shoulders to carry it, that weight. Unless your poet wills them into existence when he needs something solid to lean on; as he did your arm to grasp it; as he did your eyes to be seen by you, although he keeps avoiding your gaze like a child who knows they've done something wrong.

Shy. Overcome.

The words come to me as I observe you, and at first I think _they don't suit him—_ but then again, you need to feel love acutely to be able to write about it (still shrouded in shame, though. We all do the best we can, or at least we like to think so). His fingers tighten around your wrist; another shock of startling life goes through you. Now you know why touch was good enough to die for.

Although we weren’t thinking about that when it happened, Paolo and I. I must admit, there wasn’t much thinking going on at all.

(and I’d do it again oh I’d do it all over Father you hear me? you hear me?)

Suddenly, the wind quiets down. The storm keeps roaring around us, heavy and brutal, but it seems to be avoiding us specifically. When Paolo reels his head and goes all wide eyed, tears still quietly streaming down his face as they have since forever, I know I'm not imagining it out of desperation. You assume, and I have the thought at the same moment, that your poet's interest in us was enough to give eternal tormer a pause. 

It's been so long since I could see Paolo's face so clearly. He seems more tangible with the stillness of the air all around his beloved form. I drag my eyes from him with effort, because I know you're waiting for us, I know I need to come close and tell my story and hope immortality on the land of the living is sweeter than the one down here. 

I turn around. You look right through me; you're still fixated on the point of contact your poet has so unthinkingly created. Paolo half morphs into me as we saunter over, our legs entwine as we walk, our steps one and the same. 

We reach you. You ask me something—your voice is deeper than I imagined. Your poet trembles. And then I start talking, now that the hail allows me, until Paolo is weeping anew softly behind me, and your poet is falling into your arms—and as we say our goodbyes I think, _perhaps if given the choice we'd make the same one._ Oh, how I'd miss these shackles if they were gone. 

**Author's Note:**

> Let me know what you thought! I feel like both Paolo/Francesca and Dante/Virgil deserver more fics, and maybe I'll add to the pile again in the future.


End file.
